Traffic radar systems utilizing digital signal processing (DSP) have been in use for a number of years. Such a DSP radar system has traditionally been created with one or two radar antennas connected by wired cables to the radar processing box. A user's display box can be attached directly to the processing box or mounted remotely and connected by wired cable. A hand-held remote control unit can be connected by wired cable to the processing to allow the user some control of the system. The radar processing box can also be connected by a serial wired cable to the patrol vehicle's mobile data computer (MDT), video recording system, or other third party equipment. This allows for some system commands to be sent to the radar system and for radar speed data to be recorded and displayed.
It would be advantageous in traffic radar systems to allow the modules of the system to communicate wirelessly and for a single point or single module to be powered and communicate with the patrol vehicle MDT, video recording system, or third party computing device utilizing the industry standard Universal Serial Bus (USB). This design approach would dramatically reduce the number of hard-wired cables and increase the configuration flexibility of the radar system.
Another improvement of the invention in traffic radar systems would be for each radar antenna to have independent or distributed processing. This would allow greater capabilities to process targets in multiple directions from the radar platform.
Another desired improvement in such systems would be to allow the modules to be configured together in ways to create different product offerings. Capabilities of an improved system would include creating mechanical interfaces that allow mounting the modules in the vehicle or interconnecting modules into stand-alone products.